2014 BMW X5 SUV — the carriage trade’s wagon.

If svelte morphs into stealth, BMW X5 be thy name. It’s another way of saying that over its 15 years of existence, BMW’s flagship SUV has carefully evolved into a sculpted wagon that eschews the showiness of flashier competitors and sticks to the job at hand.

Part of that job, you might notice, is not to be noticed, yet exude a conservative look that will gladly accept the odd kudos for design but not be too loud about it. The X5 was precisely made for the country club and the upscale mall and, when asked, it will also plow through a winter storm when the mall is closed for weather.

The job of this new, third-generation X5 is to transport up to seven people in a style that to which they are probably well accustomed, and not to make any mistakes along the way. This is the class of luxury SUVs exemplified by the Audi Q7, Acura MDX, Range Rover Sport, Lexus RX350, Mercedes-Benz M-class and Porsche Cayenne. They are all worthy competitors and they’re all in the roughly $60,000 range, but can easily range up to $70,000 or more, depending on trim lines and options.

Our tester was the base X5 xDrive35i, with the 3-liter, twin-turbo inline six-cylinder engine, sporting 300 horsepower and an eight-speed automatic transmission. (xDrive is BMW-speak for all-wheel-drive.) Given the industry’s marketing mandate that almost no new car in America can be sold at its base price (in this car’s case, it is $55,100), BMW added enough options to fill up the Monroney and make the final price of the car $68,675. How did we get there?

More than $12,000 in options.

The priciest option on this car is $4,800 for the “M Sport” package. This includes $950 for, among other things, 20-inch wheels and “High-gloss roof rails.” (Matte black rails are standard; are high-gloss rails necessary?) There’s also the “Dynamic Handling Package” ($3,600) and a “Cold Weather Pack” ($550). The point here is that when you climb into the car, you really think these various options are all of a piece with the car, that it’s natural for the car to have these options and if it didn’t have these options you might think you had just bought a $55,000 stripper. So I guess there’s nothing to complain about.

However…. you do have the option to power up and get the X5 xDrive50i, which has a twin-turbo 5-liter, 450-horsepower V8; or, what turns out to be a popular option, the X5 xDrive35d, a 255-horse diesel.

A diesel model gets good mileage figures.

One reason the diesel is popular is that its EPA mileage figures are 23/31 mpg, city/highway; our 6-cylinder gasoline-fueled tester gets 18/27 mpg, city/highway. When you’re paying nearly $70,000 for a car, these mileage comparisons may not be a big concern. Using the EPA’s fuel economy tables, the cost for driving 15,000 miles a year in the diesel car is $2,300; in the 6-cylinder X5, the one we drove, it’s $2,800; and in the road-ripping V8 model it’s $3,450. Between the stingiest and the thirstiest of the three cars, there’s an annual added premium of $1,150, or $22.11 a week.

But we didn’t buy this car to save on fuel – if we wanted to do that, we would have opted for more prosaic rides, like the Prius V wagon.

No, what we have in this BMW SUV is a car that, compared to the last generation, looks a bit more sculpted – it has a slightly lower belt line – and even a bit more muscular, although, heaven forbid, this is not the Arnold Schwarzenegger of cars. No musclebound Hummer here.

Inside, the X5 has a pretty conservative look. There’s no wood to alleviate the severity of the mostly black and brushed aluminum fascia and center stack. This look is typical BMW, and in this car it works. At night, there’s a faint glow from the interior lighting strips that adorn the upper part of the doors and the dashboard. It’s a nice touch, that small psychological lift of a bit of light.

On the road, the six-banger engine, by the way, has plenty of power – its zero to 60 time is a shade over six seconds, and it begs the question of whether you really need the V8. Then again, no auto maker ever went broke stuffing 500-horsepower engines in its wares – viz., Corvette, Viper, Cadillac CTS-V and the like. Speed sells.

The engines stops at stoplights.

As for the X5, it now has “engine decoupling,” which means the engine switches off and goes dead when you’ve sat at a stoplight for a few seconds. It then switches back on when you lift your foot off the brake. It’s a gas-saving measure, but I wonder how much you save if that electric starter goes belly up from all the constant on-off, on-off it’s doing. One disconcerting aspect of all this: when it’s sitting there, dead in its tracks, the electric power steering is also off. When you try to move the wheel, it takes some effort before it finally wakes up and starts the engine. It’s an oddity, but one you get used to after a few days.

On the freeway, the X5 is predictably quiet and there’s little wind or tire noise. It’s easy to suddenly end up doing 80 if you’re not careful.

So the question is: why buy an X5 versus its myriad competitors? Frankly, it’s a close race. I liked both the Acura MDX and the Lexus RX350 (to be precise, I drove the RX450h hybrid version). But there is something alluring when you know that this BMW is, at once, a staid hauler and, when called upon, a go-fast wagon.